Consensus Reaching is a really useful mechanism both for building shared commitment, and for ensuring a complete understanding of all of the available facts and experience. But it is time consuming, and sometimes the available facts and experience are not that important, and sometimes neither in the overall scheme of things is the decision. If you devolve into consensus reaching over when to have a break, it is time to reassess the cost/value balance of your approach.
And that essentially is the crux of when to use consensus reaching – when the value of shared commitment to a conclusion outweighs the cost of arriving at it (or the cost of the consequences of not arriving at it).
So, what are your alternatives? Is there ‘Consensus Light’? Well, in a manner of speaking, there is.
If you have a number of different things that are candidates for consensus reaching, you can use other processes to narrow these candidates down to a priority set. The principle of consensus is: ‘We may not arrive at the best answer, but we accept a fair process of arriving at a best guess using the information, time and resources we have to hand.’. That ‘fair process’ can be applied in different ways in the different stages of consensus.
For instance, if you have more proposals than you can reasonably or economically handle, you can ask the group to consider a reasonable amount of time to allocate to this decision.
Depending on your group size and level of extrovert/enthusiasm disposition, consensus could easily consume 15-30 minutes per decision, so that sets your budget. The next question is to ask them to use sticky dots to vote on which candidate decisions represent the best use of that time. Give them each a number of dots between two and the number of items you are likely to take forward. But before you do – before anyone sticks anything anywhere – gain agreement that this is a fair way forward.
An interesting thing about consensus is that the more you use it the less you need a process (or significant time) to deliver it. Without consensus, people can often hold an unresolved grievance over how much their opinion is heard. But once they realise the process is fair, they begin to reassess the consequential cost of always contributing their opinion, and more readily trust and accept the outcomes without a prolonged discussion process.
Once the commitment component ceases to be a particular issue, you can better concentrate on the consensus process being a way of airing the key facts and experiences.
Consensus light is virtually any process where people are consulted on the method and agree to abide by the outcomes. And a group of committed people can often do a better job with a poor decision than the uncommitted can deliver through a good one.
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